MARY Eaken can’t get the blasted snowmobile to start. She yanks on the pull cord again and again, curses and lifts the cowling.

A gust of snow blows off the Wolverine River and blasts her face. She shoves her chin down into her coat, stares at the motor.

“Where you heading, Mom?” Bitsy calls down from the lodge porch.

“Out.”

“I can see that. You want Roger to take you somewhere?”

“I’ve been driving this machine longer than that boy’s been walking.”

Only one thing irritates Mary more than a motor that won’t start – people poking their noses in her business. She moved to the wilderness lodge with her daughter and son-in-law only because they insisted, saying as kindly as they could manage that a 72-year-old woman with diabetes, a weak heart and a dead husband wasn’t fit to live alone on a wild river. She could either come down river to the lodge for the winter or go out to Anchorage to a “retirement community”, whatever the hell that meant.

“You aren’t going to see that old crank again, are you?” Bitsy asks. “You know he shouts and waves his arms like a

crazy man every time Roger goes by.”

Mary ignores her. Truth be told, Roger drives his snowmobile too fast. And she’s feeling a bit like a crank herself at the moment.

She slaps the cowling shut and gives the cord another yank. The motor sputters to life. Mary thumbs the throttle.

“Mom,” Bitsy hollers over the engine. “Be careful, OK?”

Mary straddles the cold vinyl seat and ties her fur hat under her chin. Then she pulls on her beaver mittens. The low-lying winter sun streams through the mountains, glints off ice and snow, and brings tears to her eyes as she drives off the bank and on to the frozen river. The buckles in the ice throw her this way and that, but Mary pushes on the throttle and holds on to the handlebars for dear life as she heads upriver.

Thank God bath day comes just once a month. How often can an old man be expected to strip down and face his own scrawny legs, paunchy belly and sparse, grey chest hairs? Like a half-plucked chicken.

Ernest Tuttle takes the kettle from the wood stove and tiptoes across the splintery wood floor of his one-room cabin. He pours hot water into a steel tub. He adds a bucket of cold creek water and steps in. Mary could be here any minute, and they might both drop dead of heart attacks if she catches him in the tub.

According to Mary, the two of them first met at one of the social dances at the Alpine Inn, must be 50 years ago. She used to go down there with Charlie when they were just married. Tuttle was quiet and shy and smelled like fresh-milled birch. He never danced. Never seemed to have a girl. He sat against the wall and swapped stories with the Boyd brothers. He seemed like a sweet boy. When Charlie swept her on to the dance floor, she’d give Tuttle a little smile.

Tuttle says they knew each other long before, when they were children. One December day, he says, they held hands as they skated a slow circle across the ice. He doesn’t tell Mary that he fell in love with her that day and never again had the nerve to show it.

“Cripes! Haven’t you heard of knocking?”

Tuttle scrambles from the tub, then realises his mistake. He turns his naked backside to Mary and grabs at the towel beside the wood stove.

Mary laughs and faces the door.

“When have I ever knocked?”

“Step outside and give a man a chance to preserve his dignity.”

“If you think I’m going to go back out in that blasted wind, you’ve got another think coming.”

He’s dressed now in work pants and a clean shirt, but he’s still damp.

“I’ll get some coffee on.”

“I’ll shuffle the cards.” She sits at the kitchen table by the only window.

They never talk much, but it’s an easy silence. The “fwwpt” of the playing cards. The muffled roar of the fire in the wood stove. Outside, the river wind squalls and whips snow past the window. Beneath the table, their knees gently touch.

“What are we doing?” she asks without looking up.

“Playing a poor game of cribbage, seems to me.”

“No, I mean this. Me and you.”

“Guess we’re enjoying each other’s company.”

“True enough.”

“Dark’s coming on,” he says.

“The days are too short.”

There’s a slow reluctance. Neither of them wants to move from the table. As always, she wonders what she’d do if he asked her to stay the night.

He never does.

She takes her coat off the back of the chair, and Tuttle stands behind her to help her with it.

When they get to the door, he stands close.

“See you next month, Ernest,” she says, her voice softer than she intends.

“Yep.”

Mary reaches up to his whiskery cheek and, for the first time, leans in and kisses him gently on the lips.

Eowyn Ivey’s book The Snow Child (Headline, £14.99) is one of Waterstones’ best debut novels of 2012. SeeExpress Bookshop